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Sunshine and Shadows
a profile of john updike
The name Updike is unusual enough in Pennsylvania to make its bearers
self-conscious. It is an “odd name,” according to America’s most famous
Updike, that once upon a time “got a loud laugh in the movie theater.”
For a chuckle, “Updike” could be parodied as “Downdike” or “Downditch.” When he told people his name, John Updike says, they were
inclined to think he was being “fresh.” The book in which he makes
this admission of pain is called Self-Consciousness. “Hotel clerks and telephone operators would ask you to repeat it, bringing on (in my case) a fit
of blushing and stuttering.” Only when he moved to New York City did
he find people capable of hearing his name at first try and writing it
down “correctly, with a respectful nod.”
If Updike’s name now commands respect throughout New York and
beyond, it is in part thanks to the magazine inseparably identified with
the city. He has been a contributor to the New Yorker for half a century and
shows no signs of drying up. “John is very competitive with the younger
writers,” says Roger Angell, who has been his editor for fiction at the New
Yorker since 1976. “For about twenty years he has thought he’s on the
brink of not being able to write any more short fiction. If I mention that
we’ve got a story by a terrific young writer, he’ll say, ‘Oh really,’ and
within a couple of weeks he’ll send in a wonderful short story.”
The New Yorker has been a saving grace for Updike throughout his life.
The “little lost pocket” of Updikes in Berks County, Pennsylvania, a ter3
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ritory characterized by farming and Protestantism, and the gloomy outlook that is apt to attach itself to both callings, was expanded by the presence of a relative who lived within commuting distance of the big city.
Updike’s Aunt Mary had once worked as a secretary to the critic
Edmund Wilson. As well as bringing a fashionable “flapper figure” into
the kitchen of her country cousins, she introduced copies of the New
Yorker. “The magazine couldn’t be bought in Berks County,” Updike
says, “except maybe at the railway station. My Aunt Mary bought us a
subscription for Christmas.” Her existence suggested a world of cultural
wealth to her nephew. “I wanted to become rich in this way.”
Updike is “rich” now in ways he never imagined. He lives with his
second wife, Martha, in a large house at the stringy end of a settlement
called Beverly Farms, some forty minutes’ drive north of Boston. The
Atlantic Ocean laps at his doorstep. He can make passing reference,
while picking at a newly discovered hole in his yellow corduroys, to “my
woods.” His industry—as a novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic, and
humorist—requires three desks: one oak, one steel, and one veneered in
Formica, where, respectively, he answers letters, writes his first drafts in
pencil, and makes his advance on the word processor. Updike is tall and
trim, happy to smile at the world over his good fortune and to deprecate
his boyish manner. His head is topped by what Tom Wolfe once called a
“great thatchy medieval haircut.” Angles of elbows and shins cut sharply
across the laughter patterned regularly throughout his conversation. His
talk flows with a richness comparable to his prose. “Updike is the first
fully harvested, fully expressed American writer since Henry James,”
says Adam Gopnik, a staff writer at the New Yorker, who admits to having
“semi-worshipped him since adolescence.” Without the nourishment of
the magazine, Gopnik feels, “he might be one touch less completely
expressed than he is. I have a great love for his small, tender things—the
memoirs of Pennsylvania boyhood, for example—and doubt there
would be as many without a magazine to need them. This is as good a
vindication of the New Yorker’s existence as any could be.”
There have been less friendly reactions to Updike’s proficiency. Gore
Vidal referred to him as being “fixed in facility,” while Norman
Podhoretz, former editor of the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary,
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protested: “I have been puzzled by many things in the course of my
career as a literary critic, and one of them is the high reputation of John
Updike.” Updike’s mischievous response was to make his puffed-up
Jewish-writer hero Henry Bech—in Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back
(1982)—a darling of the Commentary crowd.
Updike was born in 1932 and raised in the town of Shillington,
Pennsylvania. Worship at the local Sunday School, attached to the
Lutheran church, began what has become lifelong observance, though he
is now among the Episcopalians. His mother’s family, the Hoyers, had
been farmers, and when John was thirteen, the family moved back to the
Hoyer farm to live with his maternal grandparents, an event in which his
novel Of the Farm (1965) is rooted. Money had been lost in the crash—
“Oh no, Johnny, we were poor,” Updike’s father once protested when the
son pluckily claimed to have wanted for nothing. While Updike senior
made a living as a schoolteacher, he was laid off each May and could only
hope to be rehired in September. During the summer, he worked on
building sites.
Updike’s initial artistic impulse took the form of drawing, specifically
the kind of cartoons he saw in magazines. “Thinking it over, I can’t locate
another artist in the Updike family. I guess it was my idea. I was an only
child, I needed an alternative to family life—to real life, you could almost
say—and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to
provide it.” As a boy, he “was not galvanized by the literary ideal.” There
was, however, one writer in the Updike family. His mother, Linda Grace
Hoyer, wrote short stories, which she sent to magazines, including the
New Yorker, only to have them returned. Disheartening though her failure
was to her, Updike reflects that “if my mother hadn’t been trying to be a
writer, I don’t know if I would have thought of it myself.” Amid his early
memories, he can see himself “crawling up into her lap while she sat at
the typewriter banging away at the keys.” Later on, his mother had more
success with the New Yorker, and a collection of her stories was published
in 1971 as Enchantment. Updike’s eldest son, David, a teacher, also made
appearances in the magazine and has published several books.
Updike began writing for the New Yorker at twenty-two. “They
accepted a light-verse poem, and then they took a story. Taking the story
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was very important to me because that was the New Yorker, and here I was
on that Pennsylvania farm. I had once thought: how can you get from
here to there? And now I had gotten there.” His first intention was to be
a humorist—“I thought that was a very harmless thing to be”—and to
join the suave Algonquin gang whose jokes had given him much pleasure
and whose drawings he had traced in imitation. “But of course by the
time I got there the gang was gone and the party was over. It’s sometimes
said that cold war anxieties, atomic bomb anxieties, killed humor, though
I don’t really buy it. But anyway, the time when facetious writing could
attract real talents was over, and the talents were looking elsewhere.”
While Updike is seldom identified as the author of “facetious” pieces,
the spirit, according to Gopnik, remains. “The secret of his writing lies in
his early ambition to be a cartoonist and a humorist. The artisanal high
spirits of the humorist have never drained from his hand. Among masters, none is so eager to please. I pick up an Updike story more or less at
random every day and find always a high-hearted vein of humor running through everything he writes.” This, Gopnik believes, is what lifts
Updike’s work “out of the normal range of poetic writing into a genial
and generous dimension of its own.” Angell has found him “a formidable self-editor. He is very critical of his own work. If we’ve taken something, and I feel that a section doesn’t connect with the piece as a whole,
I’ll bring it up with John. We’ll go over it on the phone, and he’ll come up
with a variation. He often finds something at the very last moment and
rewrites it.”
Updike majored in English at Harvard, then took up a yearlong fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford in 1954.
He mostly studied life drawing there, but it was while he was in England
that he discovered the writer Henry Green, who was to exercise a persistent power over his style. “He showed a new way to use the language.
Another writer might have done it, but Henry Green happened to be the
one.” After holding an office job at the New Yorker from 1955 to 1957,
Updike retreated with his first wife, Mary, and their two young children,
Elizabeth and David, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where two more children, Michael and Miranda, were born. Living there, not far from his present home, Updike extended himself in novels and experienced critical
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and financial success. He drove a convertible and came to assume the
identity in the mildly bohemian Ipswich community, as he once put it in
a typical mock-and-jab aside, of a “mini-Mailer.” Updike and his wife
separated in the mid-1970s and were granted a no-fault divorce in 1976.
He married Martha, thus acquiring three stepsons, the following year.
Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was, he says, “heavily
influenced by Henry Green. Greenisms crop up in later novels, too. In
Couples [1968], there are a lot of sentences that have that little blur, that little twist, that backward-something, that you find in Green.” The
Poorhouse Fair was a promising debut (Updike had already published The
Carpentered Hen, a volume of poems, in 1958), but a wider audience
greeted his second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960), the initial part of what was
to become a tetralogy spanning three decades, with volumes appearing
at roughly ten-year intervals. When we meet him, Rabbit, or Harry
Angstrom (to give him his real name), is a twenty-six-year-old basketball
player who is already past his peak. He is in a sour marriage with Janice,
which is nonetheless to prove surprisingly resilient. “The character of
Rabbit was for me a way into the America I found all around me,”
Updike has remarked. “What I saw through Rabbit’s eyes was often more
worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference
was often slight.” When first encountered, Rabbit is having difficulty justifying to his peers his support for the American action in Vietnam. He is
nervous of “Negroes” and is about to begin an affair that will rip into his
marriage. As a result of his wife’s increasing recourse to the bottle, their
newborn child is accidentally drowned, an event for which Rabbit will
never forgive her, though he himself is partly to blame. The angst in
Harry Angstrom’s name was put there on purpose. In the second installment, Rabbit Redux (1971), he will undergo a 1960s reeducation in the subjects of free love and civil rights. Toward the end of his too-brief life, documented in Rabbit at Rest (1990), he is overweight and agitated less by
angry blacks than by Middle Eastern terrorists, whose representatives
have just blown up the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie.
“People ask me what would Rabbit think of 9/11, what would Rabbit
think of George W. Bush, and I just can’t say. I killed him off. It’s strange,
you never know when you’re going to die, so at fifty-something I thought
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I’d better tidy him up before I die and then he’s left hanging. I wanted to
see him through. I think he would die young, that kind of athlete, sort of
old before his time, bad diet and so on, so I wrapped him up in Rabbit at
Rest and then regretted that enough to at least try to tidy up the children
[“Rabbit Remembered,” in Licks of Love, 2000]. I think Rabbit would probably have the same reaction to the invasion of Iraq that he had to
Vietnam, that it may be a mistake but it’s our duty to see it through. If he
were alive, he’d probably be in Florida most of the year by now and he
might have a stars-and-stripes sticker on his car. After 9/11, he certainly
would have put the flag up. Janice would have been a little more skeptical.” Judith Jones, who has worked at Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher, for
more than forty years, shepherding Updike from typescript to hardcovers, was disappointed when Rabbit was laid to rest, “because I liked to
read about him. I mean, I wouldn’t like to live next door to Harry, or to
sit down and have dinner with him, but John always gets an essential
compassion for the person. Even with someone so ordinary as Harry, or
even so obnoxious, he’s always sympathetic. He never has contempt for
his characters.”
The Rabbit tetralogy is rich in sexual detail, as are many Updike novels. Rabbit, Run emerged at a time when books such as Naked Lunch and
Tropic of Cancer were not published in the United States for fear of prosecution. Rabbit, taking eight pages to mount Ruth, the part-time prostitute
he met earlier the same evening, had to proceed toward the bookstores
with caution. Jones remembers Updike “being worried because Rabbit,
Run was rather explicit and at that period America was rather conservative. John could see himself having legal suits and ending up with no
money and four young children to support. So he said to Alfred Knopf,
maybe you should get a lawyer in to look at the obscene parts. Alfred
arranged for the lawyer to come in at the weekend, then telephoned John
in Massachusetts. And John said: ‘Oh no, I can’t come down this weekend; I’m teaching summer Sunday school.’”
Updike’s faith has remained constant through the changes of venue.
Between the Lutherans and the Episcopalians, Updike was a Congregationalist, and the shadow of the Congregational church falls across the
adulterous players of verbal and sexual games in Couples (1968). Piet
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Hanemas in that novel is led to wonder “what barred him from the ranks
of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed.”
Updike claims to “get anxious at 4 am. I seem to have this need to belong
to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. Life without religion
seems to me to lack a dimension. You may say that dimension’s an illusion, but in some ways it’s what people have done through these two
millennia and many more millennia before that.” He feels that his artistic activity “is in some way bound up with my religious faith.” Creativity
as a gift from God, to be reciprocated via worship, is not a concept he hastens to disavow. “I do think I’ve been fortunate in life. I’ve been fortunate
to achieve some of my vague ambitions and I’m grateful, when I remember to be grateful. At some point in my adolescence there was an act of
faith involved in my setting myself to become an artist. That I have succeeded in doing so is some kind of miracle, as I see it. I think of the boy I
was, and I look back and . . . I’m breathless, you know?” He is willing to
ask his religion to accommodate earthly pleasures, such as a round of golf
on a Sunday morning. “William James says something like, ‘If men can
believe in gods, then the days pass by with zest; they stir with prospect,
they thrill with remoter values.’ It’s a little like that with me.”
Updike stands apart from the ranks of contemporaries in leaning to
the right in matters private and political. In 1966, in a symposium dedicated to writers’ views on Vietnam, he found himself more or less isolated as a hawk. The New York Times pointed this out, without giving
proper consideration to his ambivalence. In reaction, Updike wrote “On
Not Being a Dove,” a fifty-page essay in which he attempted to chart the
ins and outs of his resistance to the peace movement and to explain the
roots of the untrendy patriotism fortifying his position. “I was sort of
embarrassed not to be a dove, since most writers are doves,” he says. “It’s
not my nature to go against the grain. But it was arresting to someone
raised in the depression to witness the hatred, venom, fury of those
years. In general, I think that these men we elect should be left to do the
job, and my guess is that they’re doing about as well as they can do, given
the problems they face. And I’d be willing to give the benefit of the doubt
even to Richard Nixon . . . which maybe is eccentric of me. I find it very
hard to believe that the government leaders are villainous, of our democ-
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racy or the British democracy. But maybe I’ve been brainwashed.” He is,
however, a Democrat, not a Republican, and he finds the situation in Iraq
“very troubling. It makes the administration look bad, and I won’t be
sorry if and when they’re replaced.”
Gopnik delights in Updike’s departure from orthodoxy. “It is the tension between opposed poles in his work that gives it its electricity. He is
a patriot, a conservative, a hawk—and an erotic trailblazer, a radical
writer of great courage.” The critic Zachary Leader, who has written
widely on Updike, says, “I always think of that moment in Rabbit Is Rich,
when Harry leads a Fourth of July parade dressed up like Uncle Sam. His
paunch, Updike says, ‘in itself must weigh as much as an Ethiopian
child.’ Updike knows all about American excess and its consequences.
He’s a clear-eyed patriot, certainly. But he can be cold-eyed too, and defiant, like someone who knows it’s wrong to drive an SUV but still does.
He’d stand by Harry’s conclusion that ‘all in all, this is the happiest fucking country the world has ever seen.’”
Updike’s ingrained conservatism extends to other matters. In a tenthousand-word assault on the Updike edifice in the Times Literary Supplement in 1996, Gore Vidal wrote: “He is full of Shillington self-effacing
gracefulness on what—if any—race problem there might be in the grand
old United States.” Partly, this was an effect of geography. In the
Shillington of his boyhood, there were few black faces, and the same
could be said of Harvard in the early 1950s. In “On Not Being a Dove,”
Updike declares himself a supporter of the civil rights movement in the
1960s and a contributor to the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, though he goes on to remark that he once “lent a black
man we knew some money that he never repaid.” (Harry lends a black
colleague money in Rabbit Redux, which he expects not to be repaid, and
is surprised when it is.) There is scant encouragement to integration in
Updike’s fiction of the period, where black people put in mostly perfunctory appearances, as in old movies. The couple in Marry Me, a story
of adultery and stubbornly cohesive marriage written in the mid-1960s
but not published until 1976 (the year of Updike’s own divorce), return to
their hotel after lunch to find their bed of passion “stripped and shoved
against the bureau, and a slouching Negro was lathering the carpet with
a screaming machine,” which is pretty much a typical interracial experi-
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ence in Updike’s work. When a central role was given to a black character named Skeeter in Rabbit Redux, the result was heavily burlesque. As
Skeeter is ferried into the wilderness by Rabbit at the end of the novel,
everyone, including the queasy reader, is relieved to see the back of him.
Skeeter is drawn with a large dose of affection, however, and in serving up his desperate psyche in garish tones, Updike is simply following
Rabbit into the America he finds all around him. After his daughter
Elizabeth married a Ghanaian in the 1980s, the author found himself
delighted by two African American grandchildren. In a meditation on the
subject, he counseled Anoff and Kwame that “though exactly half white”
they would be “considered black,” and black identity was often uncomfortable in a land where “the stereotypical black is a mugger, addict,
dropout and outlaw.” Updike ended “A Letter to My Grandsons” by urging them to choose an identity of their own making, and by quoting his
maternal grandfather: “You carry your own hide to market.”
Contemplation of skin as the coating of personal identity is something
with which Updike is painfully familiar. Since a bout of measles at the
age of six, he has suffered from psoriasis, a dermatological condition that
gives the victim “the sense of another presence co-occupying your body
and singling you out from the happy herds of healthy, normal mankind.”
In a poem in his most recent collection, Americana (2001), he refers to himself as a “literary Mr. Sunshine,” a piquant description, since it refers not
only to his evident good nature but to his annual effort, over many years,
to obliterate his psoriasis by hammering it with ultraviolet rays, once the
only known remedy. In summer months, Updike was indeed “Mr.
Sunshine,” but with the onset of winter his psoriasis flourished again. He
suggests that “having this disability, which was really quite shaming,
forced me to be more adventurous and daring than I ordinarily would
have been. I’m at heart a kind of cautious, conservative person, and without the skin ailment I might not have left New York, but just stayed and
grown old in New Yorker harness. It was the need to get to the sun, get to
the beach, that forced me to leave the city and my job, and of course to
earn my living as a freelance writer.” He suffers less now—“they have
pills”—but the relentless sunshine to which he exposed himself has
resulted in skin damage. “So I have that to cope with.”
Updike is surely the most prolific American writer of serious intent of
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the past half-century. In addition to thirty novels and collections of stories, he has published six volumes of poetry (his Collected Poems came out
in 1993), assorted memoirs, and children’s stories. His criticism and occasional journalism fills four mammoth volumes, the latest of which he
dubbed More Matter—an off-putting title which does no justice to the
“farraginous” (a favorite word) contents. Yet he observes that he has had
only a single number-one best seller, Couples, which appeared thirty-six
years ago. Judith Jones feels that Updike “doesn’t always get his due,”
but that nevertheless he has “the most consistent sales of any writer we
publish at Knopf. He has a distinct audience. It’s not huge, but he’s read
all over the world.” To Gopnik, talk of best-sellerdom in the context of
Updike’s multifarious talent is “absurd.” Even though Rabbit is no
longer here to grouse about the attacks on New York and Washington,
Updike would like to write “a novel about post-9/11. I’m not sure what
shape these catastrophes would take, since everything happens so violently and quickly, but I think of the British writers who described the
events of the Blitz, Green for one, and I feel I should have a try. I think if
you’re a writer you try to make something out of everything that
happens.”
Updike is reluctant to give the impression of preferring the world as it
was to the world he finds on his TV screen and in his grandchildren’s
pop records. Americans, he says, are “trying to figure out how to be
happy,” but lately “it occurred to me that I have some of my father’s
depressive temperament. He used to sit in a chair and say, ‘I’ve got the
blues.’ And I didn’t know what the blues was. Why should he have the
blues? It might be a tendency of Protestants in general. There’s a kind of
gloom, fear of death, fear of meaninglessness, and literary activity is one
way of staving it off, isn’t it? When you’re writing something, you’re relatively innocent. Time goes by so fast, I find, when I’m writing. It speeds
by. When I’m helping my wife in the garden, it crawls by.”
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